Politics

It's Morning In Griftopia: A Q+A With Author Matt Taibbi

In his new book about "the long con that is breaking America," the Rolling Stone reporter chronicles the bizarre sight of a nation about to reward—lavishly—the very same Wall Street titans, DC politicians, and shady power brokers who brought us low

Matt Taibbi, the profane, provocative reporter for Rolling Stone, is a larger-than-life figure in modern political journalism. That's both literally true (he's a big guy: he once played for the MBA—that's the Mongolian Basketball Association) and figuratively true: he writes in a scorching, contemptuous style that gives the best of his work a cast of fire-breathing grandeur. Known primarily for blaspheming the Pope, labeling Goldman Sachs a "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity", and more recently, slinging a mug of hot coffee in the face of a Vanity Fair reporter, Taibbi is clearly a man of outsized emotions. His new book Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con that Is Breaking America [Spiegel & Grau] is a stinging new history of the financial crisis that heralds a return of Mencken-esque, dirt-under-the-fingernails American journalism. Griftopia delves into the shadowy world of collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps and sovereign wealth funds, but he navigates the turgid money stuff with soaring sentences like "Greenspan's rise is…a tale of a gerbilish mirror-gazer who flattered and bullshitted his way up the Matterhorn of American power, and then, once he got to the top, feverishly jacked himself off to the attentions of Wall Street for twenty consecutive years." No one is spared. GQ caught up with Taibbi in a dark corner of a downtown Manhattan café to discuss the new book, the Great Recession, the upcoming midterm elections and what lies beyond.

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Here we are, two years into the Great Recession—most Americans are by now worn out and hopelessly confused by the financial crisis. Your new book starts out at a Sarah Palin campaign rally in 2008 and takes us back through the vortex.

When I first started covering the financial crisis I would go around the country and ask people about this stuff and nobody knew anything. Now, one out of five people understands what's going on. It's slowly getting there. But on the other hand, if you look at the foreclosure crisis and the way that's being covered, there's literally the same mis-coverage that we saw two years ago. There was a story in the Wall Street Journal last week where they're basically blaming the lawyers who are working on behalf of people who don't want to pay their mortgages for causing the foreclosure crisis. People believe this stuff. The problem with the mortgage crisis is that: you hear the word 'mortgage' and you don't even want to listen. The Republicans were the only ones who were really loud about this: they said the reason everybody got a mortgage is because the government was forcing banks to lend to people. That wasn't the real explanation. The real explanation was that the banks had figured out a way to take these subprime mortgages, chop them up into little bits, and then repackage them as AAA-rated investments and sell them to people who didn't know what they were. It's basically like selling oregano as weed. What's the first thing you do when you find out you can get away with that? You go out and buy or grow more oregano.

In a recent Rolling Stone piece, you wrote about the Tea Party: "their desire to withdraw from the brutally complex global economic system that is an irrevocable fact of our modern life and get back to a simpler world that no longer exists is so intense, it breaks your heart." What are they withdrawing to?

While I was working on the Tea Party story, I interviewed a guy who was talking about how we need to reform Wall Street because they've gone into every corner of life, how we deal with them fifty times a day when we're buying gasoline or whatever. He said, "I don't need to use gasoline. I can burn wood at home." But commodities prices affect food. Are you going to not buy food? "Well, I can grow my own food," he said. People don't realize the extent to which all this shit snakes out into every corner of our existence. They don't want to have to deal with it, it's just too complicated. They want to retreat. The big lesson I want people to get from this book is that you can't retreat. We've entered this new world of bureaucratic complexity. Your political future is now determined by how much of this shit you're going to be able to understand. There's no going back—it's here. The problem with the Tea Party is that it's been used in a way that scares people into supporting an agenda that's counter to their own interests.

Why are Americans so squeamish about going after the wealthy?

In other countries they have histories with revolutions and class movements. In America, people don't like to think of themselves like being in a lower class. They all like to think of themselves as potential millionaires. So when these politicians get up and say "We need business and the producers to be free, in order to create jobs for everybody"—people think of themselves as being on the side of the rich guy. They don't think of themselves in being in that other group. That's the genius of the Tea Party—you take these people who are all themselves middle class or below, and you make them focus on poor minorities so they think they're above somebody else.

It seems like when class is discussed in the US, the discussion is limited to op-ed columns and academia, couched in soft terms like 'inequality'.